“I ask him why he hasn’t given the word already, and he say he trying to give me some respect, ‘cause everybody know ’bout me.”
“Everybody?” Jackie said.
“He mean everybody on Hobart Street,” Hawk said.
“Which to him is everybody,” I said.
“Say everybody wondering why I am there with a flap,” Hawk said and nodded at me. “They trying to figure that out. And he say, why am I? And I tell him it seem like a good idea at the time. He doesn’t like the answer, so he sit a minute and he think about it. And then he say, `So what you going to do?‘ And I say they can do what they want to do somewhere else, not my problem. I say they can’t do it here, in this project. And he say if they just move someplace else and do it, what’s the point of moving them out, and I say the point is, I said I would. And he sit there awhile, and then he say, `I can dig it.’ And he sit awhile longer and he say, `But I can’t let you and the Mickey chase me out, you understand. I can’t let you dis me.‘ And I say, `You willing to die for that?’ And he say, `What else I got?‘ ”
We were all quiet. The waiter came silently by and poured champagne into our glasses and returned the bottle to the ice bucket. It was a quiet room. The tables were spaced so that everyone had space around them. The conversation was muted. There was thick carpeting on the floors so that the waiters in tuxedos moved as silently as assassins among the patrons, their shirtfronts gleaming in the soft light.
“I can dig it,” I said.
CHAPTER 26
Belson called me at 6:30 in the morning while I was making coffee. “Piece you gave us doesn’t check out,” he said.
“It didn’t kill the kid and her baby?”
“No.”
“Got a next of kin?” I said.
“No. Only way we ID’d her was that the kid was born at Boston City and they had a footprint.”
“Where’d she live?” I said.
“No address.”
“Baby’s father?”
“Don’t know.”
“Hot on the trail,” I said.
“You bet.”
“Well, she had to live somewhere.”
“Yeah.”
“And there had to be a father.”
“Yeah.”
“So I guess I’ll have to find him.”
“Sure,” Belson said and hung up the phone.
Susan was at the kitchen counter eating some kind of bran cereal with orange segments on it and drinking hot water with a wedge of lemon. Pearl sat on the floor, watching closely.
“The gun you took from the gang kids?”
“Yeah.” I put some cream in my coffee and two sugars. Susan was ready for the day. She had on a gray suit, and her thick black hair gleamed with ogalala nut oil or whatever she had washed it with.
“Full day?” I said.
She put her empty cereal bowl down for Pearl. “Patients all morning, and then I have my seminar at Tufts,” she said.
She stood up. I looked at her. I felt the same feeling I always felt when I looked at her. It was almost a way to monitor my existence. Like a pulse. If I looked at her and didn’t feel the feeling, I’d know I had died.
“Be home for supper?” she said.
“Depends,” I said. “If I find the guy who killed the kid and her baby, and Hawk and I get Double Deuce stabilized, I may be home by midafternoon.”
She leaned forward and kissed me. I patted her on the butt.
“You’ll not take it as a gesture of no-confidence should I go ahead and eat without you?” she said.
“You shrinks are a cynical lot,” I said.
Susan went downstairs to see patients. Pearl went to the door with her and then came back to supervise my breakfast. I was having a turkey cutlet sandwich on an onion roll with a lot of Heinz 57 sauce on it. I gave Pearl a bite.
“Hell of an improvement over bran and orange segments,” I said.
Pearl was too loyal to comment but I knew she agreed.
CHAPTER 27
I picked Erin Macklin up on Cardinal Road in front of the Garvey School. It was raining as she came down the stairs, and she was wearing a short green slicker over tan slacks. On her feet were low-cut L. L. Bean gum rubber boots with leather tops. She was bareheaded. She looked like somebody’s suburban housewife on her way to a Little League hockey game. The fact that she didn’t seem to be worried that her hair was getting wet, however, proved that she wasn’t somebody’s suburban housewife at all. “Your friend is sitting alone at Double Deuce?” she said when she got in the car.
“He seems calm about it,” I said.
“Ah yes,” she said, “the ironist.”
“You know me that well on such brief notice?” I said.
“Your reputation precedes you,” she said. “It is coloring my judgment.”
Cardinal Road was once Irish. White Catholic people my age had been born there. The houses were nearly all clapboard three-deckers with flat roofs and bay windows and a piazza across the back at each level. The doors were generally to the left side. There was a small porch, three steps to a walk made of cement, and a tiny yard. Along Cardinal Road the yards were neat and mostly enclosed with a low-clipped barberry hedge. On the minuscule lawns, greening in the spring rain, there were tricycles and big wheels. The houses were painted. In the windows there were curtains. It looked like most of the other blue-collar neighborhoods in Boston. But in this one, every face was black.
“I need more help,” I said.
Erin’s eyes moved carefully over the cityscape as we drove.
“Tell me what you need,” she said.
“A young girl, not quite fifteen, was murdered,” I said. “Around Double Deuce. She had her three-month-old baby with her. The baby was killed too.”
“Boy or girl?” Erin said.
“Girl. Crystal. You’re right. She shouldn’t be anonymous.”
“Yes,” Erin said. “Helps to focus.”
“Girl’s name was Devona Jefferson,” I said.
“I don’t know her.”
“Nobody seems to, but somebody did. I want to find somebody who knew her.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know who killed her.”
“And when you know?” Erin said.
“Depends. If there’s evidence we’ll give it to the cops.”
“If there isn’t?”
“We’ll see,” I said.
“Would you take some sort of action yourself?”
“I might.”
“And your friend?”
“He might.”
We turned onto Alewife Way. It had the same three-deckers, the same tiny yards. But the yards had no grass, and the rain had made the bare earth muddy. The houses seemed to have sagged more on Alewife, and the front porches had sagged. There was a sway in the piazzas. The houses badly needed painting. Many of the windows were patched with cardboard, and the yards were littered. There were empty bottles of Wild Irish Rose, and the plastic rings that six-packs came in, small brown paper sacks, and fast-food wrappers, some empty wine cooler cartons, and empty cigarette hard-packs with the tops open. People were out in the rain, but they seemed to hate it and walked in sullen slouches, hunching close to walls and standing in the doorway of the variety store with the thick wire mesh over the windows.
At the corner of Colonial Drive was a playground: some blacktop inside a chain-link fence with two metal backboards. One rim had no net, the other had one made of wire mesh.
“Bury one from the corner,” I said, “and it won’t swish, it’ll clang.”
“Mesh nets are supposed to last longer. But they don’t. The kids use them for weapons.”
I nodded. “Gather one end and tape it,” I said. “Kids make do, don’t they.”
“Yes,” she said. “They are often quite ingenious. They function barely at all in school, and the standard aptitude tests seem beyond them, and yet they are very intelligent about surviving in fearful conditions. They are often resour
ceful, they fashion what they need out of what they have. They endure in conditions that would simply suffocate most of the Harvard senior class.”
“Probably more than one kind of intelligence,” I said.
“Probably,” Erin said. “Let’s talk to these kids.”
There were six of them leaning against the chain-link fence in the rain. One of them had a basketball. All of them wore Adidas hightops and stone-washed jeans, and purple Lakers jackets. Three of them had white Lakers hats, two wore them backwards. They seemed at ease standing in the rain. The one with the basketball was dribbling it around himself behind his back through his legs in a figure-eight pattern. The others were smoking. Their faces froze into the uniform look of tough indifference when I pulled up. They thought we were cops. When Erin got out they relaxed, though the look flickered on again when they saw me.
“Quintin,” she said. “How are you?”
She put her hand out and the boy with the ball tucked it under his left arm and slapped her right palm once, gently.
“Lady Beige,” he said. “Looking good.” He didn’t look at me.
“He’s not a cop,” Erin said. “He’s with me.”
Quintin shrugged. The tough look flickered again. They would never be easy with a big white guy in their yard, and the look, if it wasn’t quite tough hostile, wasn’t welcoming.
“Girl named Devona Jefferson was killed a little while ago over in front of Double Deuce. She had a baby. Baby’s name was Crystal. They killed her too.”
Quintin shrugged again.
“Do you know her?”
“What her name?”
“Devona,” Erin said. “Devona Jefferson.”
“Ain’t down with the Silks,” Quintin said. “What they shoot her with?”
“A nine millimeter,” I said.
“Use a fresh pipe anyway,” Quintin said.
“You don’t know her?” I said.
“Hell, no,” Quintin said. “Anybody know her?” The other five all said no they didn’t know her. Erin said thank you and we got back in the car. We drove around in the rain talking with people for the rest of the day, not finding anything out.
CHAPTER 28
It was still raining the next morning when I checked in with Hawk at Double Deuce. There was no sign of life in the project. The rain made Hawk’s dark green Jaguar look black as it beaded and slid off the finish. I parked next to him and got out and Lyot in his car. Jackie was sitting in the front seat with him. “We been renewed?” I said.
She smiled.
“Marge has forgiven you.”
“Thank God,” I said, “She finds me irrresistible?”
“We’d already hyped the thing too much informally. We didn’t want some columnist to question why we’d said we were going to do this feature and then backed off.”
“Almost like finding you irresistible,” Hawk said. “How ‘bout the detection?”
“I’m seeing a lot of the ghetto.”
Hawk nodded.
“Nobody has confessed,” I said.
“Only a matter of time,” Hawk said. “Nothing folks in the ghetto want to do more than to find some big honkie and confess to him. Been wanting to myself.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “It would take too long.”
“What are you detecting?” Jackie said.
“Who killed Devona and Crystal Jefferson.”
“Really?”
“Un huh.”
“Well, I mean I knew that was part of what you, we’re, ah, supposed to do. But, I mean what about the police?”
“Police have hung it up,” I said.
“And what about here?”
“You and Hawk have that covered,” I said.
“And we got Marge Eagen,” Hawk said, “for backup.”
“Can you move around in the black community?”
“I have a guide,” I said.
“And you think you can do what the police have given up on?”
“You bet,” I said.
“I don’t want to sound either naive or cynical, I don’t know which,” Jackie said, “but why?”
“Why do I think I can find him?”
“No, why are you willing to try?”
“Somebody ought to,” I said.
Jackie stared at me. The rain came down on the car roof in its pleasant way. The sound of rain on a car roof always made me feel comfortable.
“That’s it?” Jackie said.
“Yeah.”
“Why should somebody ought to?”
“Fourteen-year-old kid got murdered, and three-month-old kid got murdered, and as far as anyone can see they had nothing to do with it. That shouldn’t go unremarked.”
“I’ll be damned,” Jackie said.
CHAPTER 29
It was nearly noon when Erin and I pulled into a fast-food hamburger place on Lister Way. Three kids were sitting in a gray and black Aerostar van with the doors open and the tape deck blaring. The parking lot was crowded and the restaurant was full of people getting out of the rain. Nobody was over twenty. “This time let’s try you stay in the car,” Erin said.
“Okay.”
I sat while she got out and went to the van. Again she put out her hand, again the gentle slap.
Then she got in the backseat of the van and I couldn’t see her. The two kids in front turned to talk with her. The rain made the bright colors of the pseudocolonial restaurant shiny and clean looking. There was a litter of hamburger cartons and paper wrappers and cardboard cups among the cars, and the trash barrel near the front door of the place was overfilled. With Erin out of sight I was the only white face in a sea of black ones. If I weren’t so self-assured it would have made me a little uncomfortable. If I had been uncomfortable no one would have noticed. No one paid any attention to me at all.
I shut the motor off. The rain collected on the windshield and made the colors of the restaurant streak into a kind of impressionist blur. Here’s looking at you, Claude Monet. The restaurant and its parking lot stood alone, the only principle of order in a panorama of urban blight. There were vacant lots on both sides of the place. Each one littered with the detritus of buildings long since dismantled. Across the street was a salvage yard with spiraling coils of razor wire atop a chain-link fence. Even prettified by the rain this was not the garden at Giverny.
Erin got back in the car. “Want a cheeseburger?” she said.
“Too far from medical help,” I said.
Erin smiled and closed the car door.
“These kids know Devona Jefferson,” she said.
“And?”
“She had a boyfriend named Tallboy.”
“In a gang?”
“They’re all in gangs,” Erin said. “It’s how they survive.”
“Know which gang?”
“Yes,” Erin said. “Tallboy’s a member of the Dillard Street Posse.”
“Progress,” I said.
“More than that,” Erin said. “I know him.”
CHAPTER 30
Tallboy wasn’t anywhere we looked for the rest of the day. Erin and I stopped in my office for drink. “Some of them are only seven or eight years old,” Erin said.
She had half a glass of Irish whiskey which she held in both hands.
“Some of the older gang kids will recruit the wannabes to carry the weapon, or the drugs, even sometimes do the shooting-they’re juveniles. If they’re caught, the penalty is lighter. And the little ones are thrilled. Peer acceptance, peer approval.” She smiled a little and sipped her whiskey. “Upward mobility,” she said.
I nodded. Outside the window the rain was still with us, straight down in the windless darkness, making the pleasant hush hush sound it makes.
“The thing is,” I said, “is that that’s true. The gangs are upward mobility.”
“Oh, certainly,” Erin said. It was obviously so ordinary a part of what she knew that she hadn’t thought that anyone might not know it. “These kids are capitalists. They
watch television and they believe it. They have the values they’ve seen on the tube. They think that the Cosby family is reality, and it is so remote from their reality that they find their own life unbearable. The inequity enrages them. It is not arrogance that causes so many explosions of violence, it’s the opposite.”
“Would the term `low self-esteem‘ be useful?” I said.
“Accurate,” Erin said. “But not very useful. None of the things people say on talk shows are very useful. What they see on television is a life entirely different than theirs, and as far as they can see, what makes the difference is money. The way for them to get money is to sell drugs or to steal from people who sell drugs-there isn’t anybody else in their world that has money to stealand since either enterprise is dangerous, the gang offers protection, identity, even a kind of nurturance.”
“Everybody needs some,” I said.
The whiskey was nearly vaporous when I sipped it, less liquid than a kind of warm miasma in the mouth. It was warm in my office, and dry, and in the quiet light the two of us were comfortable.
“Where do you get yours?” I said. “Nurturance?”
She sipped her whiskey again, bending toward the glass a little as she drank. Then she raised her head and smiled at me. “From the kids, I suppose. I guess the gangs provide me meaning and belonging and emotional sustenance.”
“Whatever works,” I said.
We were quiet briefly while the rain fell and the whiskey worked. There was no uneasiness in the silence. Either of us would talk when we had something to say. Neither of us felt the need to talk when we didn’t.
“Do you know Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?” Erin said.
“Don’t even know Maslow,” I said.
“Maslow’s studies indicate that humans have a descending order of fundamental needs: physical fulfillment, food, warmth, that sort of thing; then safety, love, and belonging; and self-esteem. Whoever-or whatever-provides for those needs will command loyalty and love.”
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